With the growth of business opportunities in China, foreign companies have taken the plunge and jumped right into the China market – without always looking where they leap. As with any business, success depends on many factors and building relationships is just one of them. This is where “guanxi” comes into play.MORE…

My friends and family tend to call me a “gear snob”… and I will openly admit that any day. I am very particular about my ski goggles, my sneakers, and my running leggings way more so than my every day wardrobe. I stick to the brands that I love (shout outs to Nike, Patagonia, and Asics) but there’s a new brand in the mix for me these days.MORE…

At Communispace, it’s no secret that we think a lot about developing communities: how best to facilitate them, keep members engaged, and create a safe comfortable environment for members to share thoughts and feelings that they might not share elsewhere. It’s something we pride ourselves on and honestly, we’re really good at it.MORE…

If you’re anything like me, the advent of the Groupon has been a life-changer. (OK, maybe that’s a stretch, but you’ll see what I mean.) I can’t remember the last time I went out to dinner without using a Groupon—the mere thought of doing so seems preposterous. Why would I pay for a full price dinner when I can get it for 50%-80% off?MORE…

Not much. While online research communities (also known as MROCs) seemingly bend many rules of research, brands actually risk more with traditional methods that fail to surface the “whys” behind the numbers. Quantifying research results does not make them actionable; and brands unwittingly hazard a great deal when they base business decisions on information obtained from a generic sample of unengaged, unmotivated respondents.MORE…

With over 500,000 members, Zipcar—America’s largest car-sharing conglomerate—is still in the hunt to become profitable. The answer? More customers. According to CEO Scott Griffith, a larger customer pool allows for operating costs to be “distributed more broadly,” as membership and rental fees would offset lower additional per-vehicle gas, insurance and maintenance costs. However, while this solution may bring increased profits to Zipcar, it neglects Zipcar’s greatest asset— its customers. MORE…

With a little back-of-the-envelope math, companies spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 13x more on advertising than they do on market research. If we broadly defined market research as “listening” and advertising as “talking” we could say companies spend 13x more talking than they do listening. MORE…

Imagine for a moment that you’re a high-powered, highly paid creative mind at a leading ad agency. Your job is to conjure ideas out of thin air. At the end of the month, those ideas are exchanged for a paycheck. In this Mad Men ecosystem, individuals jealously guard their ideas, making damn sure everyone knows who was responsible for which miraculous piece of copy, which genius layout, which inspired jingle.MORE…

Kendra Metzger, Community Manager and Ad Council partnership liason at Communispace discusses our exciting new partnership with The Ad Council – through which we will tap our proprietary insights communities to help expand and deepen their public service efforts.MORE…

The transformation companies experience when incorporating the voice of the customer can be as transformative as the effects of email and the Web. The ROI and business impact of customer insights and next-generation market research can, therefore, be enormous.

Yesterday, Communispace’s Vice President of Business Strategy, Bill Alberti, presented a whirlwind tour of eight case studies of Communispace communities, all packed neatly into a digestible, sharable 30-minute webinette.MORE…

This month, Fast Company published their list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies, as well as their top ten most innovative companies by industry. If you work at one of the awesome organizations on the list, congratulations. We were thrilled and excited to see a number of Communispace clients recognized as innovation leaders. Here’s a small selection from our customers that made the list:MORE…